Digg $500K Sale Returns to 'Small Team, Low Budget, Fast Cycles'

By , Updated Jul 14, 2012 03:28 AM EDT

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Digg which was considered once as a pioneer social news website and social media company, was sold at a mere $500,000.

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, New York-based technology development company, Betaworks bought the website. The report also said that Digg was offered higher deals but choose Betaworks as it provide the best plan to revive it. Since its launch in 2004, Digg took more than $45 million from its investors.

At its peak, Kevin Rose, its founder was on the cover of "BusinessWeek." The article featured his success at making $60 million in just 18 months.

Founded in 2004, Digg was the pioneer of the 'Web 2.0' trend, where users could upload content and interact with the content from others. Around seven million users still use Digg. It was valued at $164 million in 2008.

"Over the last few months, we've considered many options of where Digg could go, and frankly many of them could not live up to the reason Digg was invented in the first place - to discover the best stuff on the web. We wanted to find a way to take Digg back to its startup roots. Coming soon, Betaworks will unveil a new cloud-based version of Digg to complement the current News.me iPhone and iPad apps. Stay tuned," said, Digg's current chief executive, Matt Williams. He will join Andreessen Horowitz as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

Digg will be integrated into the News.me team. Betaworks said it will turn Digg back into "a start-up. Low budget, small team, fast cycles."

Most of the Digg's employees were hired by Washington Post Company's Social Code.

Rival website, Reddit, managed to overpower Digg. The downfall started in 2010 when Digg adopted newer designs such as Twitter-like features which were unacceptable to its users. Digg began to fall sharply since then allowing Reddit's overtaking in 2011.